"Project Classroom Makeover" Close Reading

This passage from Davidson’s “Project Classroom Makeover” takes the foundation and ideals of conventional education methods that students nowadays intuitively accept and generally complain about, and creates an argument that leaves readers realizing that they had a good reason to complain after all. As Davidson explains, little has changed within the traditional classroom in America. Teachers lecture in front of a classroom, giving information to students in separate groupings and expecting them to expertly spit out the facts and concepts they were supposed to memorize on exam day. Clearly this method is not effective, as the US, which spends double the amount that South Korea does per child on education, stands well below South Korea on the OECD. If society is to progress and cultivate creativity and real-world intelligence, the American education system should focus on cultivating a new future instead of following the past.  After all, society itself has changed. Hardly do we see unpaved roads and physical encyclopedias anymore. Technological advances have dominated our landscape, encouraging a new form of creativity and connection that should be utilized to guide education.

Reading about the schoolhouse in Mountain View, which did promote creativity and interaction among students in the absence of conventional teaching methods intrigued me, and reminded me of a teacher in the non-fiction book Spare Parts by Joshua Davis. Similar to the teacher at Mountain View, Fredi Lajvardi created an unconventional classroom, where students were given the freedom to create their own projects and lead their own education however they saw fit. The students that Lajvardi taught saw success very similarly to the students at Mountain View, leading to the conclusion that students should not be encouraged to simply follow conventional rules, but to make new ones.